Forbidden Cookbook: Franken-Treats

So today my AP Gothic Lit. class is taking a test on Frankenstein, and in honor of this I’m posting about something adorable and tasty.

One day, one of my students showed up for class with a tray of these:

She said she’d found them on Pinterest. I said they were brilliant and delicious and to please feel free to bake for every text we read!

In case it’s not immediately clear, these are Rice Krispies Treats made to look like Frankenstein’s creature. They’ve been tinted green and have a heavy stripe of chocolate for hair. Tiny marshmallow ears are held in place with little pretzel sticks. These creatures have liquid candy faces.

Maybe you could answer I question that has bothered me since I read Frankenstein. In the book, the monster is self-educated and very urbane and well-spoken. In all the movies, his IQ is very low and he lumbers about in somewhat of a daze. How did there get to be such a big disconnect? With all the movies made about Frankenstein, you’d think that at least one would follow the book.
PS those treats are adorable. I hope the student got extra credit.

I think the answer lies in the conventions of silent cinema. Portrayal of character had to be very visual, expressed in dramatic gestures. Subtlety was not possible, neither was it possible to convey the almost socratic dialogue between the creature and his creator. The tension of the novel is in the deeply philosophical question about whether a living, rational being created by man, rather than by god, can be said to have a soul, and if it does not, then what mental anguish would it go through; its physical monstrosity is almost secondary. The silent movie, on the other hand, had to rely on visual, ‘Grand Guignol’ effects (the formation of fiery flesh on the monster’s skeleton, for example, the ghastly hand reaching out from the cabinet, and the monster emerging from the curtains by the bed). In order to convey its ‘otherness’ and its monstrosity, any actor portraying the creature had to lumber, stagger, and grimace – there was no other option.

By the time talkies arrived and Boris Karloff gave his first memorable performance, a convention had been established, an impression had been sown in the minds of movie-goers, and the movie version of Frankenstein’s monster had an existence of its own, independent of its literary origins. Here’s a clip of Karloff. He lumbers, he lurches, you can’t see him without thinking of Fred Gwynne as Herman Munster. But apart from that easily-parodied pantomime stuff, I can see subtlety in Karloff’s interpretation, I can see a dawning sadness even in this fairly early scene. His grasping for the moonlight is a wonderful metaphor for the creature’s desperation for the soul he can’t have; his gestures to his creator appear to be the longing for affection or merely for acknowledgment, as much as they appear to be forming the ball-shape of the unattainable moon.

A movie interpretation, whilst often traducing the literary basis, can sometimes produce its own wonder.